Somewhere Paul Ryan is sitting alone amid the rubble of entitlement reform, all alone and sobbing like Burgess Meredith at the end of that “Twilight Zone” episode.

In isolation, that tweet makes it sound like Corker is blaming Trump. Not really. Watch the clip below and you’ll find him candid about the fact that voters aren’t interested in fiscal responsibility either, which of course is true. Or revisit this post from March, when the GOP was busy moving its grotesque omnibus spending bill through Congress. Corker dropped another truth nuke on the occasion: If Hillary Clinton were president, he observed, congressional Republicans would at least pretend to care about cutting spending. With no Democrat in the White House to posture over, though, all pretense of concern fades. He wasn’t indicting Trump so much as his own colleagues. The party’s pitiful failure to shrink government is much more their fault than his, predating POTUS’s political career by literally decades. The next time someone tells you that Trump killed conservatism, you remind ’em: That which is already dead cannot die.

By the way, Corker ended up voting for that garbage omnibus bill. And he did it after voting for tax cuts last year and then complaining that deficits are poison for the country long-term. When he says he’s “over it” in terms of caring about fiscal responsibility, he’s not exaggerating for rhetorical effect. He really is! He’s got less than a year left in politics. He’s not fighting the tide anymore. If you want to throw some more gas on the fiscal fire, he’ll hand you the can. Exit question via Jay Cost: If he doesn’t care anymore, why not resign now and let the governor appoint someone who does?

Click the image to watch.

Update: Wait, major brain fart on my part. Corker voted against the spending bill. I got mixed up because he voted for the tax-cuts bill last year and then started lamenting that it might be one of the worst votes he ever cast when he realized this spring that the GOP wasn’t going to try to cut spending commensurately. For reasons known only to him, he seems to have trusted that the party would offset the lower tax revenue by shrinking government. Why he thought they’d do that instead of just running up huge deficits like they normally do, lord only knows.